Can We Trust the Bible?

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One of the most common skeptical positions in regard to the Bible is that we can’t trust it because it has changed over time, and we don’t even have the original text anymore. We likely don’t have any of the original text, and we have very little text that goes back to the 1st or even 2nd centuries.

The “telephone game” that children play is often used as an illustration of how easily things that are communicated get twisted and changed so that we can’t even tell what the original meaning was by the time the communication comes back to us after being repeated over and over from one person to the next. This illustration is applied to the Bible as proof that it can’t be trusted because it has been translated and copied over and over and over again. How do we even know what the original text said?!

These are serious contentions. An honest person cannot just brush these contentions aside.

Yes faith is a foundation of Christian belief, but Christian faith is not a blind faith as some suppose. Christian faith means putting our trust in God, and not in ourselves. Christian faith does not insist or even ask us to throw out our minds in the process.

In fact, we are specifically instructed to love God not only with our hearts and strength, but with our minds! As I have stated previously, doubt and skepticism is not a sin according to the Bible. Thomas doubted, and he became known for his skepticism but he was a follower of Jesus. Though he was skeptical, he came to believe.

Paul urged the Thessalonians to “test everything”, and hold on to what is good and true. I call this “honest skepticism”, which should not be confused with skepticism for the sake of skepticism. Anyone who is skeptical of everything, even the certainty of truth, should not even bother looking into anything because the exercise is pointless for the pure skeptic who is unwilling to commit to any truths.

(Ironically, the contention that there is no objective truth is a self-defeating statement. The statement, itself, is offered as an objective truth, therefore it isn’t even true of itself!)

But we digress. Whether the Bible can be trusted is the question? So, let’s dive in.

First of all, translators don’t translate from the most recent copies. They always go back to the oldest copy available. Jewish scribes were career translators who were trained for accuracy. Their livelihood depended on it. They believed they were translating the very word of God, and everything we know about them indicates that they approached the task of translating scripture as a sacred exercise of the highest importance.

For these reasons, the childhood “telephone game” is not a good illustration of the reliability (or lack thereof) of Bible translations. The point and fun of he game is to see how twisted the original message gets.

Still, people are people, and people make mistakes. We might not be able to have much confidence in the current translations of the Bible, but for the abundance of texts that exist. Of the New Testament, almost 6000 texts are currently known to exist. Daniel Wallace, who is a New Testament scholar who has committed his life to digitizing all of the existent Greek New Testament manuscripts, is known for his lectures on the abundant wealth of New Testament manuscripts that dwarf the volume of existing texts for any other ancient writing[1].

And the Greek manuscripts are in addition to all the Latin manuscripts – about 10,000 in all. And that doesn’t include all the manuscripts in Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic and Armenian – of which there are about 9300.[2] Because so many manuscripts exist (about 25,000 in all), we can see all the variations in those texts, and they are many! But, we also have so many manuscripts to which to compare that we can have some certainty as to what the original text was.

Daniel Wallace has analyzed the variations as part of his career body of work and has estimated that volume of the NT text of which we have legitimate uncertainty as to what the original actually said amounts to less than one percent (1%) of the entire NT text![3]

Over ninety nine percent (99) of the text is subject to variants that do not affect the meaning or pose any issues for understanding. Those variations are comprised of spelling differences, nonsensical statements, word order, synonyms, changes that can’t be translated, missing phrases, etc. Because of the wealth of manuscripts, we can identify when a variation occurs. For instance, missing phrase or word, a nonsensical phrase, or a spelling change in one manuscript that does not appears in all or most of the others can be written off as an error.

In fact, there are just a handful of passages for which any reasonable doubt exists as to the original meaning, but none of those passages change or even impact a single Christian belief. Even the famous skeptic and atheist New Testament scholar, Bart Ehrman, acknowledges this in the appendix to his popular book, Misquoting Jesus.[4]

Going back to the Jewish scribes, we had little historical proof that the Old Testament had been accurately preserved for many centuries. The oldest Hebrew manuscript dated to the 10th century AD until the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the 20th Century. The Dead Sea Scrolls containing book of what we now call the Old Testament (except Esther), including the famous Isaiah Scroll, and the Dead Sea Scrolls have vindicated centuries, over a millennia, of translation by Jewish scribes, showing virtually no significant deviation going back to the 2nd and 3rd Century BC.[5]

Our study and analysis of the wealth of biblical manuscripts gives us very good assurance that the text we have today is virtually the same text that was written in the originals to a very high degree of certainty. The variations that appear do reflect that fact that people make errors, even when trying very hard not to, but errors we find have not changed any of the meaning, and we can identity the errors because we have so many manuscripts from which to compare. Most importantly, the messaged has been preserved.

But there are other reasons we can have confidence in the biblical narrative. For instance, the biblical story is not the kind of story we would expect someone to make up if someone were inventing a religion. Throughout the Old Testament and continued on through the New Testament, the people whose stories are captured in the text are described in mundane, dull, unflattering and very human terms. Their weaknesses and failures are often highlighted without any apparent attempt to gloss over them or explain them away.

Further, parts of the story seem to be contradictory with other parts, especially on face value. The writings are not tied up in a neat bow. If the Bible were just a product of the imagination of people, these things would be smoothed out. The main characters would look more like the heroes of other stories that are myth or legend. If you spend any time reading the scriptures of other religions, you will see what I mean. The Bible does not read like Greek tragedies, the stories of the Roman gods, the Baghivad-Gita or other scriptural accounts.

These things don’t prove that the Christian Bible is the Word of God, of course, but they give us confidence that the text has been preserved accurately from the beginning. And even if we may not have 100% certainty in every word, we have something like 99% certainty that the words we have now were the words as they were originally penned. Most importantly, though we have 100% confidence that the message has been accurately preserved. Bottom line, then, is that we can trust that the Bible we have now is an accurate reproduction of the message that was conveyed by the original authors.

[5] See The Dead Sea Scrolls Shed Light on the Accuracy of our Bible, by Dr. Patrick Zukeran, April 17, 2006 (“A significant comparison study was conducted with the Isaiah Scroll written around 100 B.C. that was found among the Dead Sea documents and the book of Isaiah found in the Masoretic text. After much research, scholars found that the two texts were practically identical. Most variants were minor spelling differences, and none affected the meaning of the text.”)